THE MASKS OF WAR

This story was
submitted to the People’s War site by Roger Marsh of the ‘Action Desk –
Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Peter Barclay.

THE MASKS OF WAR
By Peter Barclay

”Piddle into a towel or a handkerchief and hold it to your face. It's better
than nothing in a gas attack,” my mother smiled trying to reassure me. Weeks
later the rubber gas masks arrived in their neat cardboard boxes. We learned to
duck our necks in first and then pull the masks over our faces. Within minutes,
the plastic window clouded up, but it all seemed fun and as gas attacks never
happened, masks lay in the back of cupboards until the end of hostilities.

It all seemed a bit pointless, the Germans seldom raided us in the North West.
True, we said goodbye to bananas and oranges, essential food was rationed. The
news on the wireless was not too good, but we sang songs about The Lambeth Walk
and Washing on the Siegfried Line and the fun remained for a further year or so,
yet imperceptibly the stage was turning. When air raids on Manchester
intensified, attitudes changed. My parents put on a good face and led me in the
middle of the night down to the dining room where the table was pushed against
the wall. We waited and listened. There was the guffaw of anti-aircraft fire,
the crunch of distant bombs, the steady hum of our own aircraft then........
”It's one of theirs, you can tell by the chugging of their engines.” At last,
the all clear siren and a sleepy return upstairs to bed.

As raids intensified, my dad decided to move the beds downstairs. At first it
was a bit of a laugh, the three of us in the same room. He spent his weekends
designing new blackout and would arrive home from the hardware shop with the
latest supply of wooden laths, thick black paper and eventually the latest in
roller blinds. I regarded my father as King of the Night, until I found that
Britain was full of them, DIY men before that term was actually invented. Over
our new bedroom window, he carefully glued sheets of muslin to protect us from
bomb blasts. All we could see through the garden windows was a sea of pale
white, which rapidly turned to sickly green as mould formed between fabric and
thin plate glass.

It was safer to sleep on the floor beneath my bed, a bit like camping. I woke
one winter morning to find my parents still in bed. “My comic arrived?” I
wondered vaguely why dad hadn't gone to work. Mum pulled back the kitchen
curtains; the nearby privet hedge and side of the house were plastered with
thick sickly looking clay. After breakfast we wandered outside to collect
shrapnel, those shiny bits of distorted shells that had rained down from
ack-ack fire. The house next door but one, had a massive hole in its roof where
a huge lump of boulder clay and grit had penetrated the bedrooms and living
room. Fortunately the two elderly owners survived unharmed. Not so fortunate
the occupants of a house five minutes walk away. Later my father came home with
the news, “Manchester's been blitzed. A German aircraft hit by gunfire, knew he
was going to crash, he off loaded his bombs. It struck that house by Stoney
Path. Everyone was killed, it could have been us,” he added. For once my mother
looked really worried.

With Allied successes at Stalingrad, El Alamein and Anzio the tide was moving
in our favour. The Americans had joined the war, a food parcel arrived in the
post unexpectedly. It was from our relatives in New York. There were gifts of
candy bars and garish tee shirts, one or two crazy comics and a small book on
American birds that I kept for years after. A strange uniform appeared in town,
Polish servicemen were in dark blue, neatly tailored outfits were on the
American troops and airmen who were flush with money. Inevitably, girls flocked
towards them, becoming the first GI brides after the war. They brought their
crew cut hairstyles, doughnuts and Glen Miller music. Britain was never the
same again.

Towards the end of the war, strange faces appeared in the fields; good looking
men with black hair and strange accents, Italian people, used to farm life. I
stood by a roadside and watched a team of muscular, fit looking men with an
officer in charge, engaged in a drainage scheme. I liked the ingenious way they
smoked their fags in home made cigarette holders with a little pipe at the end.
I had never seen men work harder. They were German prisoners of war. Where were
the Giles cartoon figures of block-faced troops with blonde cropped hair and
brutal intent? These men looked all right to me. Was this another mask I needed
to discard? Times were changing rapidly. Months later the German prisoners
wandered around the shops unhindered, they merely wanted to get home and out of
uniform for good.

As young teenagers, the lads I went around with enjoyed exploring the lanes on
bikes or walking in the Derbyshire hills alone. We could map read and liked
doing our own thing. When peace was declared, I don't remember any street
celebrations. Neighbours met casually in the road, enjoying the splendour of
that summer evening. Trees were in full foliage, roses were in bloom and the
air balmy with success: it seemed enough. That revolving stage had turned
again. When I looked at my parents, I seemed to see them for the first time.
Gone were the young folk of the thirties, masks were off revealing the tired
careworn faces of a middle-aged couple. They'd coped with raids, rationing and
constant queues, plus Home Guard and ARP duties for five long years. Peace was
with us again, but a different peacetime now that the Masks of War had finally
disappeared.